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Description

Jesus Heals the Blind Man. BIBLE SCRIPTURE: Mark 8:25, "After that he put his hands again upon his eyes, and made him look up: and he was restored, and saw every man clearly."

Starting with a simple audio tone generator (in GitHub now: https://github.com/LesHall/blind-sight) and planning to add fingerprint and full-screen audio time-spectrum generation and whatever other features will e-NABLE the use of cell phones without vision.

Also once it is possible to discern an image in this way, it is a simple act to point the back cam around the environment and detect the surroundings of the blind person. With training and practice, plus some high tech sensory stimulation, it may be possible to give the blind a type of sight.

I got to thinking about the visor worn by the Star Trek character Geordi La Forge (actor LeVar Burton) and how relevant it is to this project. Based on the wrap-around shape of the visor and the line-scanning mode of the Photosound software that NoodleDriver told me about, it occurred to me that we could combine the two to make the BlindSight software work.

The technique will be to make each pixel or group of pixels a sound source and then locate them all in spatial arrangement around the listener's head. Then sweep the image from bottom to top (or top to bottom selectable), over and over. This would produce a real-time encoding of an image for blind people to perceive!

I'm very excited about it and plan to code up a simple example in Processing right now! Hope to have something soon.

Welcome NoodleDriver to the project; we are sure to get plenty of help from this friend of mine from Ireland as he tells me he has a Diploma in Audio Engineering. We were just chatting about the project and NoodleDriver informed me of some existing work that can convert an image into a song. The program is called Photo Sounder. It is available at photosounder.com and NoodleDriver just played for me on Skype, the sound of his own image!

I had thought of much simpler techniques and had in mind an FFT of the image played as a time-spectrum; apparently this is readily available in software written by others. This is such great news! I'm really impressed with the audio I'm hearing at this moment over Skype. We are testing different images. So now we are having fun with it! I better go, so WELCOME NoodleDriver!